Temporary shelters differ from traditional permanent buildings or structures in that a temporary shelter must be portable and relatively easy to construct. This is particularly true when the shelters must be constructed to provide housing for a large number of people in a short amount of time. For example, during a military deployment or an emergency situation where an area's housing may be destroyed or made uninhabitable.
Additionally, conventional temporary shelters deployed in combat zones or other areas where violence may break out are often not resistant to high-velocity projectiles, gunfire and/or fragmentation shrapnel. Currently, the Middle East is one such dangerous area. The desert environment of the area poses additional dangers to personnel stationed there as the extreme temperatures must also be taken into account when erecting shelters.
Currently, temporary shelters are limited to traditional tents, which only offer limited protection against weather and to some pre-fabricated housing units which are no better than sheet-metal structures or cargo containers. These shelters offer little to no ballistic protection to their occupants. Additionally, with current shelters, deployment in certain environments, such as a desert, also highlights the fact that these shelters do not offer adequate thermal insulation.
Even if these shelters are ballistic resistant they usually achieve this resistance by using relatively expensive and exotic materials such as aramid fiber-based ballistic materials (e.g., Kevlar® or Nomex®) that are layered together to form panels. This protection also suffers from the drawback that every component of the panel must be manufactured at first location, stored at another, and then brought to the site, thereby increasing the logistical difficulties and expenses.
Other, less expensive, techniques of increasing the survivability of a structure include adding armor plating to the structure or surrounding the structure with earthworks, such as sandbags. Applying armor plating to existing conventional structures suffers from the drawback of lack of portability and high cost. While age-old earthen defenses offer a cheap means for increasing survivability and are readily available at the deployment location, the very high manual labor requirements of building earthworks around temporary structures is not desirable. Therefore, fortifying conventional structures using earthworks (e.g., sandbags) is not practical on a large scale.
Furthermore, the threat of terrorist activity, such as suicide-bombers, where an attack may occur from the inside of a structure may negate any armor or ballistic protection provided by the outer walls of a structure. There is therefore a need to provide a means to compartmentalize or cordon off areas within certain structures, e.g., command centers.
Presently, there exists a need to provide a means for constructing temporary shelters that have a high degree of ballistics protection (i.e., capable of stopping conventional small arms munitions) and that is portable and practical enough for rapid deployment and construction. It is particularly desirable to have a ballistically resistant temporary shelter which receives most of its protection from materials that are readily available at the location of deployment.